Volker Schmidt writes:
> I would be a little bit more careful:
>
> If no bits of the railway survive, remove it. But if some bits are still
> there (e.g. buildings converted to different use, some pieces of railway
> bed, ...) it may be useful to maintain also some abandoned and now
> invisible objects in the database in order to be able to understand the
> former structure.
Yes, exactly. I can point you to places where there are "no bits" of a
railway left. And then I can point you to oddly connected roads, and a
lack of buildings, or new buildings. How would you know why those
things were that way if the railway that went through there has been
deleted?
And both abandoned and dismantled railways are rendered
on specialized maps like OpenRailwayMap.org. They serve a purpose in
the database.
It's BAD ENOUGH that abandoned railways aren't rendered on the osm.org
map at *some* zoom level. It's tolerable that dismantled railways
aren't rendered. It's intolerable to recommend deleting something from
the database just because *you* fail to see it.
I fear that the deletionism infection has jumped from Wikipedia to
OpenStreetMap.
--
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